Happy Mel Tormé's birthday!
posted 9-13-2010 - 11:25 pm

It's Velvet Fog Day. Were he still here with us, Mel Tormé would be a venerable 85 years old today. As it is, Tormé died in 1999 at the age of 73, but his music lives on. And he was a Chicagoan, born and bred, so I'm happy to write a few words about my jazz homeboy.

Born 10 years too late to become a big band singer, Tormé may have been pegged as a crooner early on, but he became a true jazz singer in short order. According to critic William Ruhlmann on Allmusic.com, Tormé did it "by being more appealing to the jazz audience, which responded to his obvious affection for the style and his talent for jazz singing (he was bested only by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald in his ability to scat)." Tormé also made it his job to keep improving his vocal technique throughout his lifetime.

Actually, Mel Tormé is the closest thing we have to a Renaissance man in jazz: as noted on Allmusic, his accomplishments included acting in more than a dozen feature films and on radio and television (not all of the roles included singing, either); hosting radio and TV shows; and writing television dramas, numerous articles for periodicals including Down Beat and The New York Times, and six published books of fiction, biography, and music criticism. He was also the musical advisor for The Judy Garland Show on television during the 1960s, which your parents or grandparents probably watched. In addition to being a singer, arranger, and prolific songwriter with more than 250 songs to his credit, Tormé was also one hell of drummer (see the video clip below). Still, most people know him best as the guy who wrote "The Christmas Song."


Mel Tormé and the Frank Wess Orchestra, 1990




Tormé held his own as a scat singer against the likes of Ella and Jon Hendricks. His scatting was expert and, like Ella's, always exuberant. His ballad style far outdid did common crooners like Perry Como and Andy Williams, as evidenced on his pairing during the 1980s with pianist George Shearing. The their two "Top Drawer" albums and several other records beautifully showcased the best of these two artists' respective talents. The rarely performed "How Do You Say Auf Wiedersehen?" on the first of those recordings is a particularly lovely rendition of the Johnny Mercer song, and Tormé's take of "Stardust" is the most aching, haunting version I've ever heard. The album also won a Grammy.

Tormé came to the attention of other jazz musicians early. He was 15 when he auditioned for bandleader Harry James. At the audition, the young Mel presented James with a song he'd written himself, "Lament To Love." James didn't take on Tormé, considering him too young, but he did use the song, which the band recorded for Columbia. The tune gave the band a week-long spot at #10 on the jazz charts in August of 1941. At 16, Tormé droppped out of high school and joined Ben Pollack's band as a vocalist and drummer. It was his first real jazz gig, and he worked pretty much steadily for five decades after that.


Ella and Mel at the 18th Grammy Awards, February 1976




At the age of 21, Tormé was already gigging in nightclubs. They would be his primary venue, along with concert halls and jazz festivals later in life. Even though his songbook went out of style on the pop charts by the 1960s, Tormé just persisted in singing the jazz he knew best until the fans came around again. And they did. Tormé's association with Rob McConnell and The Boss Brass and with the Marty Paitch Dektette during the 1980s reinvigorated Tormé's career. He took advantage of it, performing, traveling and recording regularly right up until he had a stroke in August of 1996. He had recorded the live album A&E Presents An Evening With Mel Tormé just a month earlier; that CD reached #25 on the jazz charts (the album includes one of my favorite versions of "Since I Fell For You," complete with a memorable flub near the end of the first verse). Tormé eventually recovered from the stroke, but he continued to be plagued with medical problems over the next three years and never performed again.

Tormé was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in February 1999. He died in Los Angeles four months later. But his legacy was secured: just before the A&E performance, he had assisted Rhino Records in putting together the first comprehensive retrospective of his recordings, the boxed set The Mel Tormé Collection, 1944-1985. A complete discography can be found at Allmusic.

Happy Count Basie's birthday!
posted 8-21-2010 - 10:00 pm

The Kid from Red Bank, NJ, William James 'Count' Basie, was born 106 years ago today. Oscar Peterson's birthday was last Sunday, the 15th. Both are long gone now, Basie having died in 1984 and Peterson in 2007, but they left behind a wealth of wonderful recordings. But as good as those recordings are, Basie and Peterson were two swingin' piano players who were best heard live, and BBC television caught them together, playing this take of Jumpin' At The Woodside with the Basie band.

All you Lindyhoppers, get ready swing out: this is fast, but short enough to dance to:




It's obvious those two are having a really good time. Compare that to this equally playful version on their first album together, the 1974 issue Satch And Josh. Backed by Freddie Green, Ray Brown, and Louie Bellson, the two romp through numbers like Buns Blues, Burning, and Lester Leaps In. Dancers will appreciate several tunes on that album: a nicely swinging, laid-back version of These Foolish Things along with Exactly Like You and Louis B. A few slower blues round out the album.

At one point, the Canadian-born Peterson had a program called Words And Music on BBC Four, and the clip above is excerpted from that show. The sidemen included Martin Drew on drums and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass. Here are Basie, Peterson, Drew and Pedersen from the same program playing a slow blues (check out Basie's expression at the 1:11 mark):




In this next clip from the program, Peterson and Basie discuss, among other things, what they like in a piano (Basie preferred one with a light action, meaning the keyboard responds to the lightest touch; you don't have to pound the keys to play). The two then play an old Basie tune, Blue And Sentimental, at the 6:00 mark of the clip to demonstrate that preference, with Peterson taking the lead and Basie playing behind:




One of the things we learn from this interview is that Basie was a pretty funny guy when he wasn't playing, whether it was getting in a good one-liner or telling anecdotes. Peterson was no slouch, either. Here, the two have fun discussing other musicians, including Duke Ellington and Art Tatum, and the art of musical intimidation (a Tatum specialty):




Basie and Peterson recorded three more albums together, of which The Timekeepers is probably the best. These recordings represent four-handed piano playing par excellence and provide a very enjoyable way to listen to the differences between the two artists.

Satch And Josh ... Again (1977)
Night Rider (1978)
Count Basie Meets Oscar Peterson - The Timekeepers (1978)

Bill Basie may be known primarily for his big band work with the various Basie orchestras, but he also played solo piano, piano duos, and in small group settings throughout his career. Between 1954 and 1983 alone, he made at least 22 small-group recordings. You can celebrate Basie's natals this weekend by giving some of those albums a listen. Enjoy!

Missing Dick Buckley
posted 7-27-2010 - 5:52 am

Dick Buckley died last Thursday in Oak Park. He’ll be buried today. His death prompts reflection on the unobtrusive but pervasive influence his broadcasts have had on my life. Strange, considering we never met, but you have to really love jazz to understand. He’s been off the air since July 27, 2008, yet I still can’t listen to Duke Ellington’s “Skin Deep” (Dick’s usual sign-on song) or Benny Goodman’s “Goodbye” (with which he often ended his broadcasts) without thinking of him.



I heard my first jazz on television: Duke Ellington. Count Basie. Ella Fitzgerald. Tony Bennett. Nat Cole. Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong. But I first learned what jazz was on radio, and I heard the most jazz there. I still do.

Music has been a constant backdrop in my life, and most of that music has been jazz. Sure, I listened to a little rock as a kid (okay, maybe more than a little). I loved the Beatles (who didn’t?) and Bob Dylan (ditto), listened to a lot of British bands like everyone else, discovered alternative rock when it was still outlaw late at night on maybe two local FM stations, and was taken with the good-time harmonies of the Beach Boys. Particularly when I realized they sang perfect driving music and I really wanted to drive. But somewhere in there early on, jazz made its presence known: Stan Getz invaded the top 40 with bossa nova, and my best friend and I were smitten. I found myself turning more and more often to FM and to jazz. My allowance was spent on Getz-Gilberto albums and Miles Davis, not just favorite books. I even found jazz on vinyl LPs by chance at the public library and discovered Monk and Brubeck and Davis's and Gil Evans’s superb Porgy and Bess by accident while looking for Rhapsody In Blue. It was ear opening, and mind blowing. It would change my life.

Had to be somewhere around early fifth grade that my parents first acquired a transistor radio and my music listening truly began. They had it permanently set on classical FM, of course; I fiddled the dial and found first top 40 AM, then alternative FM, then jazz, in short order. Only a matter of time before I got a smaller, cheaper, less pretty and less powerful radio of my own to listen to music at bed time, radio on the pillow, flashlight and paperback in hand.

Not long after that, I discovered WSDM – W-smack-dab-in-the-middle, the station with all the girls and all that jazz, and wasn’t it soooooo cool to have all-female deejays – and my education began in earnest. I did my homework to jazz, my daydreaming, my writing, my scheming; I made my plans for the future to jazz. With morning forays to WBEE-AM to hear Marty Faye and Larry Smith, I woke to jazz and in the summer lunched to it, too. I fell asleep to it. Eventually, I even got around to dancing to it.

Nearly everything I know about jazz I owe to two people: Yvonne Daniels and Dick Buckley.

Before I turned 25, Yvonne Daniels on WSDM was my principal instructor, every weeknight evening from 7 to 10pm. After 25, it was Dick Buckley and his colleagues, first at WBEZ, later at WDCB when some of those colleagues migrated. But in between, it was late-night public radio on KBIA-FM in Columbia, Missouri, where I was in grad school at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, that expanded my listening, kept me from missing Chicago, and set me on a musical road that would endure.

Discovering public radio at Mizzou was the key to finding WBEZ once I returned home, and, through that, Dick Buckley, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, NPR's Jazz Profiles, and so many other jazz programs. But Dick had the podium most of the time. Daniels, after all, left WSDM in 1973 and didn’t return to its successor, WNUA, until 1989, by which time I was a solid WBEZ/Buckley devotee. It was during his tenure there that I heard jazz programming on the radio first expand, then (at least locally) contract. I got so spoiled and so accustomed to listening to Dick week nights that every time 'BEZ cut back his schedule, it was like another chunk cut out of my life. Stripping his show down to a mere hour on Sundays was the final insult. I haven't donated one red cent to 'BEZ since they dropped his show (and that's your fault, Tony Malatia).

Was there ever a time in my adult life when I didn’t listen to Dick? Only that year or two before he came to WBEZ in 1977 and then again after he left in 2008. It was 31 years of a graduate-level seminar in jazz that felt more like a long series of fun jam sessions that always ended too soon.

And now that education continues without him. Dick Buckley, the man who more than anyone else opened my ears to a wide range of music that I wasn’t sure at first I’d like. Dick who, despite his mainstream bent, was amenable to music beyond traditional and big bands while keeping and passing on his excellent taste in classic masters. Dick who taught me that the music’s roots are properly called traditional jazz (sometimes called trad jazz in slang), not Dixieland, Dick who schooled me as to why Louis Armstrong was the granddaddy (or at least the godfather) of it all, and Dick who pointed out that good jazz always has a decent dose of blues flavoring it. Dick who made me appreciate soloists and solos as well as trios, quartets, and other groupings and offshoots of multiple sizes, and the way soloists changed the way they played in different groups (or didn’t, and why). Dick who provided insight.

Yvonne Daniels invited me to the feast; Dick Buckley made me realize there was a menu with choices. Yvonne introduced particular musicians; but Dick was the one who filled in the blanks and put it all in context. What Dick provided went beyond just information or history: it was the perspective that made all the bits and pieces I already knew about jazz come together and make sense.

After I started listening to Dick, I began to realize just how much depth and breadth and scope there was to jazz, and that I might or might not like all of it (I still haven’t made my peace with AACM and the very avant-garde, where it’s all solos and riffs and no melody; but I realize it, too, has a place in the spectrum). Yet the more I listen, the more I find to love. New players, new tunes, new arrangements of old songs worth keeping. There’s always so much more to hear and enjoy. And I know that no matter how attentively I listened to him, I never learned enough from Dick Buckley; there was always more to know. But it was joy listening.

Unless someone resurrects and rips to CD his weeknight shows on WBEZ and his Sunday Archives of Jazz programs, something irreplaceable will be lost. Something new listeners will never learn. There was only so much time that he was given on air, and it was always too short. Now it’s ended, for good. No going back.

So maybe it’s fitting, or some kind of balance, that I start my deejay blog just as Dick Buckley has left us, picking up where his education of my ear left off. Time for me to start passing along what I’ve learned, even as I miss Dick’s beautiful bass-baritone voice. Perhaps he’ll be in some other-dimensional ether, keeping company with spirits of other jazzmen dearly departed; perhaps he lives on in memories shared, for as long as someone remembers; or perhaps he’s just gone, one more loss to the universe’s merciless entropy. But wherever he is, if he still is, I hope he’s enjoying one hell of a jam session.

Thanks ever, Dick. And may you have what you always wished for us: happiness.


UPDATE: Dick's massive collection of jazz recordings and books went to auction in February 2011 at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago. It wasn't so much that the heirs thought it would bring a lot of money as that the preview night would be an opportunity for his many admirers to get together and remember him.

Nevertheless, the collection was so large that even his family didn't know how much he had: more than 8,000 Jazz LPs, 45s, 78s, EPs, mixed tapes and CDs, including many compilations that Dick put together himself. Also included in the sale were books and original reel-to-reel broadcasts of his radio programs. The Hindman folks had a time of organizing it into 92 box lots of about 100 items each, by category. Now, some lucky people have a piece of Dick's music library and enjoy part of the rich American musical legacy his listeners loved so much. And still do.